Listen, that whole chaotic mood swing—last week, or the one before, who even knows—was extreme. A tight Friday wrap that pulled a cosmic all-nighter, spilling over to Monday and Tuesday just to keep the momentum? My biological clock, doing pushups in public, decided to lead with that late energy, and no wonder it seeded this entire piece. A blessing in disguise, or maybe just a prank from time itself. You’re not wrong. That sophomore year wasn’t a curriculum; it was a cosmic vibe check that kept failing.
We were re-upping that mood, filtering the relentless state of lateness, deep, existential dread, and the crushing linguistic panic that went from English terror to the silent, suffocating archives of French, Latin, and Greek. The whole atmosphere was a chaotic, utterly unbothered existence, a pure mess. The raison d’être of the numbers—the undeniable, clean, analytical logic of math, economics, and accounting—was the locus standi, the thing that had the right to exist and hold court. Meanwhile, the words? They were just background noise, a collective t’s Greek to me murmur, an overwhelming, dissonant drone that felt like a solecism against my very attendance, a profound grammatical error committed just by showing up to a place where language was a hostile foreign entity.
My English class was the epicenter of the absurd, a pure taunt. It became a dramatic absence, a helpful void that, with the kind of high-irony only the universe can pull off, was the closest thing I got to a helping hand. I’d slip in, always late to the party, navigating the relentless déjà vu of finding the key under a mat that wasn’t there, a pure, distilled, and almost comforting absurdity.
The teacher, a chalk-dusted, beautiful genius whose diction could bench-press syllables and whose gaze carried the silent scars not of the intellectual revolution, but the 1970s Ethiopian one, simply never came to class anymore. The whole semester, the entire structure of the learning objective, dissolved into an ex post facto (retroactive) fantasy: we’d get the grades after our M.A., or maybe after the actual heat death of the universe—a completely willy-nilly promise hinged on a generous, mythical grade. This system’s credibility? It was as solid as a Johnsonese sermon being pithy, which is to say, absolutely nonexistent. Our afternoon sessions dissolved into what we affectionately termed Chat hour—a blessed, coffee-fueled sabbath of unearned confidence, where we were the masters of our own syllabus-free domain. This whole setup was ultra vires (beyond powers), wildly outside the bounds of academic contract, but we accepted it, no further questions, as the department’s stare decisis (the law’s memory habit, the way things were always done).
The truth is, the silence of that room was more oppressive than any lecture. It wasn’t an empty room; it was a vast, psychological testing chamber. Every time I walked in, I felt the unsettling chill of being observed—a camera hidden in the marvels of the marbles cladding OCR, ILS, its tiny red light blinking, filming my confusion and late arrival, a silent witness documenting the pathetic lack of education. It was a classic Hitchcockian setup: the tension lies not in what happens, but in what doesn’t happen, and the certainty that we were, somehow, being judged for our collective intellectual failure.
The true linguistic panic, the paramnesia (false memory) of ever having been intellectually capable, truly began when the French and Latin anxieties started creeping into my English failure, like a ghost in a language machine. It all started with the Dictionary Fiasco. I got the initial, exhilarating vu jamais moment—the unsettling feeling of utter novelty and clarity—when a friend handed over a “very simplified,” “very current” Merriam Webster-type dictionary. It was the absolute antithesis of the heavy, archaic tomes I usually faced, a slim, modern promise of instant linguistic competence, designed, I swear, for someone who scrolls through life in 30-second bursts and requires only the most surface-level understanding of existence. It was the promise of a final boss move against my linguistic inadequacies, a silver bullet against my acute, paralyzing sense of being a Latinless dolt—a linguistic plebeian who couldn’t even parse the prepositions. But friendship politics are a brutal sport, and with the devastating cruelty of a fleeting moment of clarity, he retracted the gift. He handed the slim, modern promise of linguistic competence to a high school student who probably thought “stare decisis” was the latest Instagram filter. Those images, once circulated among Soviet-era students, flashed back in the memory of that moment.
No effort could reverse the decision, not even the most theatrical, woe-begone lament, which left me incredibly short-changed. I could have turned to the old reliables: Amsalu Aklilu and GC Mosbach, an Amharic-English dictionary that ruthlessly could have forced me to be functionally bilingual just to look up and understand one single English word. But I dumbly ignored that, and my search ritual became an agonizing time killer, a pilgrimage to Kennedy Library (the crossroads/center where trivia is exchanged), where finding a simple definition became a descent into ad nauseam repetition and a cosmic side quest. It was a ritual of humiliation, and every search confirmed that trivia comes from the crossroads where people discuss small, insignificant things, and I was perpetually stuck at the smallest, most insignificant of those things—a single word.
The Dictionary Fiasco wasn’t just about a book; it was about the sudden, sharp retraction of agency—the power to know. And the hidden camera from the English class? It seemed to have followed me. I’d catch myself glancing around Kennedy, convinced that someone was watching me fail, watching the sweat on my brow as I flipped between three languages just to understand a fourth. The humiliation was the script, and I was the unwitting star.
Then came the group work, a prima facie (first glance) chance at academic and social redemption, led by a student, a rare young man from Iluababora who was effortlessly good with both numbers and words—the perfect synthesis of the two intellectual worlds. My Second Big L, my most iconic fail, hit when I read his final draft. I was immediately triggered, profoundly upset by a citation, a Latin-sounding “guru” I was tired of seeing everywhere.
The shock, the profound cacoepy (poor pronunciation, poor understanding) of my misreading, was the sudden, awful realization that “Ditto”—the Latin for “the same” or “as before”—was not an individual. That self-inflicted academic eggcorn was truly devastating; the déjà vu loop of my sophomore year clarified instantly: Ditto was the personification of the repetition that haunted me. Every single time I saw it, the material was saying, in the driest, most bureaucratic Latin imaginable: This is the same. Nothing new here. The loop continues.
It was the system’s ultimate, minimalist defense against the vu jamais—the avoidance of all novelty. It was the crushing weight of classical language used not to illuminate, but to insist upon the endless, crushing recurrence of the status quo. It left me with a bleak, almost Johnsonian wisdom: some words are indeed more powerful because they are the quiet, unassuming, two-syllable conductors of the looping vibe.
This paranoia deepened when I realized the chilling implication of the camera imagery: it was like finding the camera hidden in the ceiling only to realize the lens was pointed at another, identical room—and the film was already rolling, capturing an endless sequence of the same mistakes being made by the same students who couldn’t escape the linguistic trap. The whole system was built on the terrifying truth of Ditto.
The true break, the actual, meaningful vu jamais—the moment of unsettling novelty and clarity—came not from English, nor from the Latin shadow that followed it, but from economics, delivered by the man who spoke the language of Greek logic: Dejene Aredo (PhD). He walked into the lecture hall radiating gusto, the sheer, visible force of his intellectual confidence. This was the man we’d seen grilling MA students, his certainty so complete he could casually distance himself from his lecture notes, treating them as mere suggestions. Then he dropped the bomb, the res judicata (the final word, the matter decided) of his class that instantly elevated the stakes from a passing grade to the currency of intellectual survival: the answer is not only the answers right, it is all about the good argument.
We were shaken in our boots, experiencing a promnesia (memory of the future) where sound argument, derived from rigorous, persuasive thought, was the only currency. This was the ultimate, necessary break from the déjà vu of rote learning. The terror was replaced by the exhilarating, terrifying demand for clarity. This was the intellectual Columbus’s egg moment. The explorer, after being challenged by a shallow courtier who insisted his discovery was simple and inevitable, didn’t reply with words. He took an egg, invited everyone present to make it stand on end, and when they all failed, he simply cracked the shell on the table, leaving it standing firmly on the broken base.
The sound of that squelch was the sound of a paradigm breaking. The courtier’s sneer, “Nothing is easier than to follow it,” was the epitome of déjà vu—the realization is only simple after the initial act of violation. Dejene was telling us to stop seeking the false comfort and certainty of the de jure (the law on the page, the rulebook) and master the de facto (the real-life energy of persuasive thought, the ability to make the argument stand), to be the one who cracks the egg.
His lesson was a furious, elegant demand for precision of argument—the ultimate skill of Greek rhetoric (logos), the ability to move beyond mere definition (Latin) into persuasive, actionable truth (French Cartesian clarity). It was the only thing that could break the historical, linguistic loop of misunderstanding that led to the devastating Mokusatsu disaster.
I realized then the horror was not simply in misreading Ditto; the terror was global. The Mokusatsu tragedy—where a single word, intended by the Japanese government to mean “to refrain from comment” or “wait and see,” was tragically interpreted by the Allies as “to ignore” or “treat with contempt”—had catastrophically altered the end of WWII, potentially culminating in the atomic destruction it was trying to avoid. A single, linguistic solecism at the highest level—an error of ambiguity—became the catalyst for ultimate violence. This was the Hitchcockian climax. The lesson was not about economics, but about the lethal precision of language.
Dejene’s class wasn’t a vibe check; it was an ultimatum. We had to be the ones to crack the egg, successfully and precisely, every single time, or risk historical, global catastrophe. The looping vibe was history itself, and the Ditto that had haunted me was revealed as the system’s terrifying tendency to repeat destruction due to a lack of argumentative clarity. The pressure was now cold, absolute, and terrifyingly clear. We were no longer late; we were standing at the precipice of language failure, where silence or ambiguity was simply not an option.
This final realization, this vu jamais moment of unsettling novelty, became the amicus curiae—the friend of the court with receipts—for my battered soul, proving that the chaos was not a personal flaw but a systemic trap. The relentless déjà vu of my youth—the Sisyphean scramble of chasing elusive TV cameras at Meskel, then called Abyot Square, only to be told by some stone-faced newsreader that the film wasn’t “washed” or the footage was lost, felt like a deliberate ritual of looking backward. This was the same energy as our window shopping around Addis Ababa Stadium, where the pecking order would be music shops, then sports goods, with personal computers from IBM (Afcor) at the bottom.
We were never tired of seeing the photos of Bob Marley and Prince, or the posters of Brazil’s 1970 World Cup heroes, with that song naming the Portuguese legends. As we approached the stadium, we’d stop for a long break at Pele Music shop to give our ears to the melody spilling from the loudspeaker. I remember one moment most: the image of Bob Marley from his last concert, cut from a foreign newspaper, accompanying the news of his death. Little did we know he’d once passed right where we sat. Tewdros Mekonen said that when they were playing at the Ghion Hotel, Bob, just a passerby, jammed with them, giving David Kassa strange, unheard-of key combinations to follow. This was a vu jamais moment of musical invention, a total reset.
The thought of Kiftet (alias Gap), an Amharic adopted stage drama by Debebe Seifu, now filled my mind. Debebe, a vu jamais Alexander Pope-laced epitome to whom the word genius can be applied with ease, left a huge gap in writing and its rigorous studies in Ethiopia. He was rescued in his sophomore year from the uncharted sea of Debit and Credit in accounting by the renowned editor Amare Mammo, following an unthoughtful academic blunder in discharging him from AAU.
Distress leading to depression distanced him from the literary scene, the poet who was touted as having all that it takes for a Nobel prize in literature by his Amharic essay pioneer friend Mesfin Habtemariam. Among many others, his contribution of easy-to-use and never-to-forget, exact unique coining of Amharic equivalents for English words are household words in the Ethiopian literary scene. He passed away at the age of fifty, eighteen years ago. His brother Abebe, while bitterly lamenting his loss, underscores Debebe’s unparalleled craving never to settle for routines that Ethiopia’s literary scene failed to tap.
If my memory is not failing me, the story on Kiftet spins over a professor, so snobbish he was, his attitude left him with no friend in the University, where he had a teaching post. While digging through his academic records, his foes came up with a course in which he had earned an “F” while being an undergraduate ages ago. The “F” was not removed from the record. Therefore, it was decided by the University senate to hinge his stay with them on the result after seating an exam to remove the “F”. He scored “F” again. The ultimate academic loop.
This corporate déjà vu of management manuals being delivered like periodicals to be taken home and never to be heard of was a ritual of insisting on process, regardless of outcome, a pure Johnsonese defense against action. The poor, genius technician named Girma of ETV, if memory hasn’t failed me, who invented the “application” to shorten the washing time, had his gadget tossed in an ultra vires move by a boss steeped in the gospel of the old ways. Girma was a martyr to the loop. His vu jamais—his blinding moment of invention—was violently rejected by a system whose only raison d’être was yesterday. The déjà vu was the department’s cash register mentality, a stubborn mechanism designed to remain “Incorruptible” by actively rejecting novelty, ensuring that Ditto remained the reigning philosophy.
The real vu jamais truth, the one that rips the script in half and breaks the loop, comes from outside the suffocating, Latinate archive of the past. The vindication was global, a stare decisis overturned by universal absurdity: the Ig Nobel Prize validating the struggle of jamais vu—that bizarre neurological glitch of staring at a simple word like ‘appetite’ until it feels profoundly alien and wrong. The prize was given for the experimental, successful induction of this feeling by simply having participants write the same word over and over until its meaning dissolved. This is the Greek truth of semantic satiation—when the word’s very sound becomes meaningless, the logic fails, and the oppressive order of the language collapses. This is the absolute opposite of the Latinate compulsion to name and categorize; it is the absurdist-flavored coffee break moment of finally saying, Nah, this word is cooked. This silent, internal declaration of, “I am bringing a Napkin,” became the somatic trigger for seizing the unscripted present.
I remembered a couple of friends when and where PG labeling was a future tense, ages ago, while watching a video at home with their little kid. A routine had formed—the little soul would be ordered to fetch a napkin, and soon after the kid began walking, I found myself muttering, I am bringing a Napkin. This internal phrase became the ultimate mental reset, proving the loop is internal and manageable. This mental reset is as powerful as the Circadian Clock Nobel proving that the body’s time-loop is a program, not an unchangeable destiny. The déjà vu is the trap of the constantly ticking biological clock, forcing you into predictable cycles; the vu jamais is the urgent, unscripted reality of the present, the active refusal to follow the tick-tock.
The sophisticated move isn’t to be a Latinless dolt who cowers before Ditto, or a master of obscure, verbose Johnsonese; it’s to be a master of the reset—a champion of the de facto argument over the de jure rule. The proverb, time heals all wounds, is deeply sus; the clever, cynical twist, time wounds all heels, is the vibe that truly sticks. Because the only way out of the historical, linguistic déjà vu is to actively seek the vu jamais—the clear, unscripted, terrifyingly novel reality of now, forcing the world to acknowledge your locus standi to exist outside the loop. This is the ultimate raison d’être. The final shot of the film is me walking into the sunrise, the past firmly behind, a sense of promnesia—a clear memory of the future I am building—guiding my steps. The camera pulls back, revealing the road ahead is an exact, freshly paved replica of the road I just left. It’s the same road, the same environment, the same socio-economic loop. But this time, I’m smiling. Why? Because I have cracked the egg. The shell is broken. I know the rule now. The loop is external, but the Columbus’s Egg squelch is internal. My intellectual freedom is res judicata. Bet.
The Columbus’s Egg moment, the squelch that shattered the table, was Dejene’s gift, the French clarity of Cartesian doubt applied to an argument: I think, therefore I argue.
The shallow courtier, the one who saw the egg standing on its broken base and sneered, “Nothing is easier than to follow it,” was the very embodiment of déjà vu. He could follow the path, but he could never conceive of it. He lacked the vu jamais to violate the premise of the challenge—that a whole egg must be balanced—and introduce the necessary, de facto destruction that leads to the de jure solution. It was a victory of persuasion through action over passive knowledge, an aggressive assertion that the argument, the breaking of the shell, is the answer.
This is the ultimate Hitchcockian finish, the full circle of the loop. I am on the same road, the same scene, but the tension is gone. The camera pulls back, confirming the environment is unchanged, yet I am calm. I know the trick now. I am smiling because the fear of the endless repeat, the fear of Ditto and Mokusatsu, has been replaced by the power of the vu jamais to break the egg at will. I am the reset button. The film is still rolling, but I control the editing.
Contributed by Tadesse Tsegaye